Yusif Sayigh

Description

A rare firsthand account by a prominent Palestinian economist of his youth and childhood in the mandate-era Levant and his life's devotion to the cause of Palestine
An acclaimed economist and lifelong Palestinian nationalist Yusif Sayigh (1916-2004) came of age at a time of immense political change in the Middle East. Born in al-Bassa, near Acre in northern Palestine, he was witness to the events that led to the loss of Palestine and his memoir therefore constitutes a vivid social history of the region, as well as a revealing firsthand account of the Palestinian national movement almost from its earliest inception. Family and everyday life, co-villagers, landscapes, pleasures, outings, schooling, and political figures recreate the vanished world of Sayigh's formative years in the Levant. An activist in Palestine, he was taken prisoner of war by the Israelis in 1948. Later, as an economist, he wrote extensively on Arab oil, economic development, and manpower, teaching for many years at the American University of Beirut and taking early retirement in 1974 to work as a consultant for a number of pan-Arab and international organizations. A single chapter on Palestinian politics provides insights into his later activist work and experiences of working as a consultant with the Palestine Liberation Organization to produce an economic plan for an eventual Palestinian state.
This fascinating memoir by a pioneer and major figure of the Palestinian national movement is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Palestinian life during the first half of the twentieth century as well as an account of some of the most pressing political and economic issues to have faced the Arab world for the better part of the twentieth century.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Earliest memories, Kharaba, 1918 -1925
Chapter 2: Al-Bassa, 1925-1930
Chapter 3: Boarding school, Sidon, 1929-1934
Chapter 4: Tiberias, as a boy, 1930-1938
Chapter 5: At AUB, 1934-1938
Chapter 6: Ain Qabu; first job; work for the PPS, 1938-1939
Chapter 7: Teacher in Iraq, 1939-1940
Chapter 8: Life in Tiberias as an adult, 1940-1944
Chapter 9: Jerusalem, 1944-1948
Chapter 10: Prisoner of war, May 1948 - spring 1949
Chapter 11:"Life will never be the same without her": Um Yusif's death (December 1950)
Chapter 12: Palestinian Politics
Epilogue: "Bread with Dignity: Yusif Sayigh as an Arab Economist

Sujets

• Social History
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617976421
• Langue: English

Extrait

YUSIF SAYIGH
YUSIF SAYIGH
Arab Economist, Palestinian Patriot
A Fractured Life Story
Edited by
Rosemary Sayigh
The American University in Cairo Press
Cairo New York
This electronic edition published in 2015 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright 2015 by Rosemary Sayigh
First published in hardback in 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 671 6
eISBN 9781 61797 642 1
Version 1
To Yezid, Joumana, Faris, Shona, Yusif, Diyala, Jad, and Ayla

And with heartfelt gratitude to Hala Sayegh for her help with Arabic words and family history
Contents
Map of Mandate Palestine
Introduction Rosemary Sayigh
1. Earliest Memories, Kharaba, 1918-25
2. Al-Bassa, 1925-30
3. Boarding School, Sidon, 1929-34
4. Tiberias, as a Boy, 1930-38
5. At the American University of Beirut, 1934-38
6. Ain Qabu, First Job, Work for the PPS, 1938-39
7. Teacher in Iraq, 1939-40
8. Life in Tiberias as an Adult, 1940-44
9. Jerusalem, 1944-48
10. Prisoner of War, May 1948-Spring 1949
11. Life Will Never Be the Same without Her : Umm Yusif s Death, December 1950
12. Palestinian Politics
13. Bread with Dignity : Yusif Sayigh as an Arab Economist 301
Notes
Glossary
List of Yusif Sayigh s Publications
Map of Mandate Palestine, 1920-48 (B rre Ludvigsen)
Introduction
Rosemary Sayigh
The Man and the Family
Yusif was a great storyteller. The first of his stories to rivet my attention was the one about his capture by the Israelis in Jerusalem in 1948, and transfer to a prisoner-of-war camp where he spent almost a year. He told me this story in Beirut, when I stopped off on my way home from Baghdad to London, before we decided to marry. I also loved his stories of childhood, particularly those about al-Bassa, his mother s village in northern Palestine. His memories of his childhood in Syria and Palestine were like scenes from a film, separated from the time and place of narration, yet hyper-real. Characters from the past-Andraos the al-Bassa transvestite; Umm Rakkad who put the bishop of Haifa to flight when he attempted to shame her for adultery; Butros the blind Egyptian convert who took up interminable residence on the ground floor of the Sayigh family home; Abu Dakhlallah, the traveling seller of religious tracts whose itinerary always included a stay at the Sayigh home-were preserved in the memory of this curious and sensitive child. Yusif s descriptions of al-Bassa, spread between sea and mountain, endowed with rich water sources and luxuriant vegetation, formed a lost-Eden setting for these arresting figures.
Presiding over these picaresque scenes was the loving presence of Umm Yusif (Afifeh Sayigh, Yusif s mother), whom I only knew from a framed family photograph. She was mysterious to me because of her premature death two years after the Nakba, and three years before our marriage, yet she was part of my life through Yusif s exceptional attachment to her. He had been her favorite son, but she was special not just in his recollection but also in that of everyone who had known her. Saintly was a description often used of her. After her death, Yusif s brother Fayez said, Life will never be the same without her. Abu Yusif (Abdallah Sayigh, Yusif s father) never changed his black tie though he outlived her by more than twenty years. That the essential scenes from Yusif s recollections should begin and end with his mother is entirely fitting.
Umm Yusif was highly educated for a woman of village background, having been sent as a boarder to the Gerard Institute in Sidon. She had worked as a schoolteacher before marriage and had looked after seven children, cooking, cleaning, and sewing for them. The first four children were raised in Kharaba, the village in Jabal al-Druze where Abu Yusif had property, and where he had built the Protestant church with support from an American missionary, Mary Ford. When the Druze uprising against the French began in 1925 Abu Yusif was in Damascus. Alone, Umm Yusif escaped with her four young children before the church was burnt. The family moved to Umm Yusif s home village, al-Bassa, in northern Palestine. After five years there, Abu Yusif s vocation as pastor took the family to Tiberias, still under the patronage of Miss Ford, to a rambling old house near the lake, close to the Scots Mission. 1 There they remained until the expulsions of 1948.
Though Yusif also admired and loved his father, and describes his many unpastor-like qualities, such as skill in carpentry and love of modern gadgets, he did not enjoy the stern Protestant discipline of their family life, focused around prayers and Bible readings. It is evident from the memoirs-and others who remember her confirm this-that the family revolved around Umm Yusif. A severe hemorrhage in 1931 at the time of the birth of Anis, her last child, brought on a heart attack nine years later, leaving her a semi-invalid. 2 War and expulsion from Tiberias in 1948, the move to Beirut, and anxiety over Yusif s fate as prisoner of war surely hastened her death in 1950.
The memoir or autobiography as the genre developed in the West was a record of the achievements of important men as movers of history, and has moreover always tended to focus on the individual. Family background would typically form the first chapter of the Great Man s memoirs but would be left behind as the subject proceeds toward his celebrated place in History. In Yusif s case, however, his parents and siblings are inextricably part of his memories. As eldest son he had fathered his siblings, helping to eke out his father s meager salary as pastor to put them through college. His narrative, as a result, is full of stories about his family, including frequent references to the achievements of his brothers. This is as much a family story as it is the story of Yusif Sayigh.
Theirs is indeed a remarkable story, containing several elements that typify Palestinian and Arab families but others that are singular. Arab readers will recognize the struggle of the parents (particularly Umm Yusif) to get the children educated. Singular is the way Abdallah Sayigh and Afifi Batrouni met by accident in 1914, and fell in love and married; how Umm Yusif persisted in trying to persuade Abu Yusif to move somewhere where there were better schools than Kharaba; how he resisted because of his dedication to the church and ties to the village; and how Umm Yusif acted alone to save her children during the 1925 uprising. It was Umm Yusif who took Yusif across the border from al-Bassa to school in Sidon, and it was she who persuaded the school director to lower the fees.
Education marks Yusif s memories as theme, personal ambition, moral value, and source of family pride. Obtaining schooling was a constant struggle for the Sayigh family, given the extreme poverty of public education in Mandate Palestine and Abu Yusif s modest salary as a pastor. Kharaba had only one elementary school; al-Bassa had more schools but none at the secondary level; even in Tiberias the Sayigh children had to go elsewhere for secondary schooling. This meant that all seven children had to be sent away to private boarding schools to get high-school diplomas and qualify for college. Paying the fees wasn t easy. Scholarships, the generosity of friends, Yusif s contribution, and loans here and there enabled all six Sayigh boys to go through university. Four of them chose intellectual professions, one engineering, and one medicine. Four obtained PhDs. Yusif himself left university with only a BA in business administration. He didn t gain his doctorate in economics until 1957, at the age of 41.
Umm Yusif s weak heart seems to have been inherited by all her sons; all died from some form of heart failure, two of them while still in their fifties, all but the youngest, Anis, before Yusif himself. Combined with mourning for Palestine, these family tragedies cast a shadow over our family gatherings. Even so, Yusif s natural optimism and love of life color his recollections with joy rather than sadness.
I had long wanted to record Yusif s memories, partly because his background was so different from mine, partly also because we both came from middle-class families on the edge of poverty who valued education highly. But it wasn t just the difference in the landscape of our childhoods that made me want to record him; it was also that he had taken part in or lived through so many momentous events, and actively participated in many of them. I felt that his recollections must have value as part of the history of a region characterized by rapid political, social, and cultural change. People today can hardly remember how life was in villages in Jabal al-Druze and Galilee-what people wore and ate, what homes were like, how children were brought up, how they played, what were treats and punishments, what a missionary boarding school was like. Today there are few people left who lived through the Nakba.
Yusif did not share my enthusiasm for recording his memories. He would say that he wasn t important enough, it would be a sign of conceit, a trait he disliked. There were figures such as Abdel Nasser, al-Assad, Arafat, who created movements and made things happen; these were the proper subjects of memoirs. He did not accept the idea that ordinary people can contribute to a richer understanding of history through their m